


What's Past is Prologue

by AlynnaStrong



Category: Mysterious Ways
Genre: Babysitting, Gen, Younger Miranda, Younger Peggy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2019-01-06 08:42:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12207738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlynnaStrong/pseuds/AlynnaStrong
Summary: Teenaged Peggy babysits little Miranda.  Perhaps explaining why they don't get along so well at first when they meet again.





	What's Past is Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I had an idea to write about the three main characters intersecting several times before really meeting, then the show did it for me with Peggy/Declan, so this is the only section I actually wrote. I recently came across it on my hard drive. I figure, I read the AO3 Mysterious Ways archive; maybe someone else will as well. Anyway, it has more chance of making someone smile here than confined to my hard drive. Jordan is borrowed from the movie Real Genius mostly because I think the actresses look alike (& to torture Miranda's parents).

**20 years ago...**

Peggy calmly walked up the long driveway to the Fieglesteen residence. Although her family was new in town, she had already gained a reputation as a responsible babysitter. She genuinely liked children and never abused her phone or refrigerator privileges. _Wow, this house is huge,_ Peggy thought, _I guess they won't have any trouble coming up with my fee._

She knocked and Mr. Fieglesteen, a clean-cut and handsome man, opened the door. "You must be Margaret," he said. "Please come inside."

"Thank you. And everyone calls me Peggy." Peggy walked inside, marveling at the pristine spotlessness of the house. _Apparently this family's motto was 'Everything in its place.'_

As she stepped from the foyer into the living room, Peggy could see Mrs. Fieglesteen leading a child by the hand. The little girl was wearing a crisp, navy-blue sailor dress. Her dark hair was cut into a cute pageboy style, but her pale skin told Peggy that she probably didn't get enough time outside. _The parents are a little overprotective_ , Peggy thought. The little girl blinked curiously at Peggy through alert, blue eyes.

"Peggy, this is Miranda," Mr. Fieglesteen said.

Miranda waited patiently, holding her mother's hand.

Mr. Fieglesteen smiled apologetically at Peggy. "Miranda's in that phase where she's shy around strangers. She'll grow out of it." He smiled at Miranda.

"Okay Miranda, say hello to Peggy. She'll be in charge while Mommy and I are away."

"Hullo Peggy," Miranda said without warmth. She had kept the same neutral facial expression since Peggy first saw her.

"You can go play, Sweetheart," Mrs. Fieglesteen said, patting Miranda on the back.

"'kay." Miranda walked quietly into the living room.

"The number where you can reach us is by the phone if you have any serious trouble. Of course the fire department, police, and ambulance numbers are beside the phone as well." Mr. Fieglesteen seemed a little nervous.

Peggy looked around the corner at the little girl who was studiously wrapping her Slinky around a table leg.

"I'm sure we'll be just fine. She looks like a little angel." Peggy smiled confidently. _Overprotective_ , she thought again.

Mr. and Mrs. Fieglesteen exchanged a quick but unmistakable look of skepticism. "Well, I guess we should go. But don't hesitate to call if you need us." Mr. Fieglesteen smiled weakly. Mrs. Fieglesteen put her arm around his waist and led him out of the door.

Peggy, while still confident, began to wonder if she shouldn't have talked to some of the other girls who babysat to see if there were some kind of special circumstances here. She went into the living room to check on her young charge.

"Do you want to show me your room?" Peggy asked. This was one of her best icebreakers for gaining children's trust. They would feel comfortable since they were the host, and Peggy got to see, by observing their decorations and toys, what sort of things they found interesting.

"Why?" asked Miranda. She was perfectly happy playing with her Slinky. _Springs were neat - didn't everyone think so?_

 _Uh-oh,_ Peggy thought. If little Miranda was in the 'why' stage this could be a long night. There's no way to give an answer that the child can't just turn around and ask 'why' again. Peggy decided to try a different approach.

"I thought we might find a game we could play together. What sort of games do you like?"

Miranda shrugged. Games were boring unless she was playing against Jordan. She always beat babysitters. And then they got mad for some reason.

 _Uh-oh again. From the look of things around the house, Miranda's parents don't encourage a lot of play in here. They probably think it's too messy,_ Peggy thought. She had little patience for people who treated a house as more of a museum than a place to live. In fact, if Miranda's parents were as overprotective as she was thinking, the poor kid might not know much about how to play with others.

"I know! How about some chocolate chip cookies?" This was one of Peggy's more desperate measures to win a child over.

Miranda again only shrugged, but when she looked up at Peggy, there was a flicker of interest in her expression.

"Great! I'll just make half a batch so your parents won't take your dental bills out of my pay," Peggy said, feeling somewhat relieved.

  


Peggy found her way around the kitchen, grabbing bowls and ingredients as she found them. "Now how much flour for half a batch?" she muttered mostly to herself.

"Mommy would use a cup an' a half," Miranda said, trying to be helpful.

"Well, Sweetie, she would be making a whole batch. I thought I'd just make enough for the two of us."

"You said that already," Miranda grumbled, feeling like Peggy had insulted her intelligence. "Mommy uses three cups for a full pan, so it'd be one an' a half for half a pan."

Peggy's eyes involuntarily swiveled to the small child, whose head didn't even reach the kitchen counter. "How old are you again?"

"Four and two-thirds. It's 117 days 'til my fifth birthday."

Peggy began to feel distinctly freaked out. Most kids that young were barely counting in integers; she'd never seen one who understood fractions well enough to apply them before.

"I want a pony," Miranda added.

Well, at least she wasn't completely strange. "You can sure count high. Did your parents teach you that?"

"No," Miranda muttered. She was beginning to notice Peggy's amazement and decided to forgive her for the perceived insult. Also, her stomach was starting to grumble and she wanted Peggy to get back to baking the cookies. Miranda was hungry a lot of the time lately. When she would ask her parents for seconds or a snack though, they would get that strange look in their eyes and tell her to wait.

"Oh. Well, do you like to play with numbers?" Peggy was pretty sure she could come up with some mathematics games for them to play. Peggy didn't know it, but she was actually coping with caring for a gifted child more adroitly than Miranda's own parents.

"Not really. Too easy." Miranda always - ALWAYS - won pure math games, even against Jordan. As young as she was, Miranda had already realized that games were no fun if there's no way you can lose.

"Ah." Peggy couldn't help but think of her backpack full of homework. Her first urge was to see if the kid could handle algebra, but she decided against it. You should always do your own work, of course, and she really didn't want to know if a four year old could outdo her in math.

  


The cookies were excellent, and Peggy could see that Miranda was warming to her. _Probably because I let her eat eight cookies out of the twelve,_ Peggy thought guiltily, hoping that Miranda wouldn't end up with a stomach ache. She had certainly become more animated than before, climbing, jumping and running around spontaneously. In an attempt to calm Miranda down and prevent any accidents, Peggy asked, "Would you like me to read you a story?"

Miranda looked genuinely interested. "Sure!" she said.

She led Peggy into a room decorated in blue with a subtle cowboy motif. There were a great number of toys lining the shelves that looked like they had been lovingly improved from their original design. A few creations still in progress were kept on shelves higher that Miranda would be able to reach.

"This isn't your room is it?"

"No. Jordan's."

"So, you've got a big brother, huh?" Peggy could remember sneaking into her brother's room when he was away, too. Poor kid - she must be lonely.

"Sister. She's in boarding school." There was some anger in Miranda's voice. Miranda snaked her arm into a low bookcase and handed a book up to Peggy.

From the look of the toys, Jordan couldn't be over eight and she was already in boarding school. _What a weird family!_ Peggy looked again at the decor of the room - blue, cowboys, tools - at least it was nice to know that this family wasn't big on gender stereotyping.

She looked at the book Miranda had handed her. "Nancy Drew," Peggy smiled at Miranda, "you like mysteries, huh?"

Miranda smiled a little and nodded earnestly.

  


Peggy thought that the hard part of the job was surely behind her now. She and Miranda settled into the living room and Miranda was soon swept away in the story. Peggy was over four chapters in and going strong when Miranda made a terrible mistake. In order to better visualize Nancy and Jo kneeling in the snowbank outside the decrepit mansion, Miranda closed her eyes. Peggy happened to look up around that time and noticed that her charge had apparently drifted off to sleep.

Peggy checked the clock and was startled to notice that it was nearly nine o'clock. "C'mon Princess," Peggy whispered, trying to get her arms under the sleeping child, "time for bed."

Miranda's eyes snapped open. "No!"

"Come on now, you can't even keep your eyes open."

"I was just...I'm not sleepy!" It was true. For the past year, bedtime had become a running battle between Miranda and her parents. Miranda had slept normally at first, but gradually required less and less sleep. She could now only manage five hours a night at most, with four hours being closer to the norm.

This wouldn't be so bad had her parents' reaction been more reasonable. They absolutely refused to allow her to stay up later or to do anything if she awoke earlier. The near hysterical response from her mother when she had caught Miranda up and playing in her room before daylight had been frightening. Mrs. Fieglesteen had grabbed Miranda by the shoulders and made her promise that she wouldn't end up like Jordan. Miranda had promised, though she hadn't the slightest idea to what. She had since resigned herself to 4-5 hours of sleep followed by 3-4 hours of what was essentially solitary confinement where all she could do was lie quietly, play games in her head, and wait for the sun to rise.

Mrs. Fieglesteen's sometimes tearful mantra that Miranda was 'not like Jordan' was really more pitiable than anything else. She had been driven past her breaking point by what should have been a blessing - two gifted children. She had done a fine job with Jordan at first, encouraging her talent for invention with appropriate toys and, later, tools. As Jordan grew, though, she started to eat more and sleep less. She seemed to stop sleeping entirely around the age of seven, becoming more and more hyperactive. She used those extra hours at night to invent and build any number of things which she would immediately want to show off to her parents, never mind that it was four o'clock in the morning. Finally that, coupled with their creeping realization that Miranda was also not going to be just an average kid, had resulted in the Fieglesteens enrolling Jordan in a school for gifted children in Pasadena - a boarding school that allowed a maximum of two weeks home vacation a year.

Miranda still didn't understand why her sister had been sent away. She couldn't believe that Jordan, who was always so generous to everyone, could have done anything very wrong. Even worse, the looks her parents gave her sometimes made Miranda feel like she was walking though a minefield where any misstep would result in being sent away herself. There was a strange set of rules she'd figured out she had to follow: don't eat more than you're given, don't run, sleep as much as you possibly can, always look calm, never get excited - none of it made any sense to her. She actually looked forward to having a babysitter; then she didn't have to worry about following all the 'special' rules.

"You have to go to bed, Miranda. Your parents will kill me if you're still up when they get home." Peggy tried to sound in control, but she could see from the look on the child's face that this was not going to be an easy battle.

"No! I'm really not sleepy. Why don't we play a game?" Miranda was trying to bribe Peggy by offering her something she'd denied her before.

 _A game. That wasn't a bad idea. But how about if it's more like a bet._ Peggy hated to play a trick on the kid, but it was best to head off this fight before it got started. "Okay, Miranda, we'll play one game. But if I win, you go straight to bed. If you win, you can stay up 'til your parents get back and I'll say we just lost track of time."

"Okay! How about checkers?"

"No," Peggy had to work this just right, "I'd like to try a new game. It's called 'Monkey See; Monkey Do.'"

"How does it work?" Miranda asked suspiciously.

"Well, first I do something and you have to imitate it, then you do something I have to do, and so on, back and forth."

"Do you have to repeat all the ones that have been done before?" Miranda didn't see the challenge otherwise. In fact, even with that, it was just a memory game which Miranda figured she had a good chance at winning.

"No, you don't repeat the previous steps." That was important for the trap Peggy had planned. "It gets hard because you can't do anything other than what I do. So, if I did this:" Peggy flexed her hand so that her index finger and pinky touched. "You couldn't use your other hand to force yours to touch. Also, it's not fair to do anything that the other person just couldn't do. Like, it wouldn't be fair for me to jump up and touch the top of the refrigerator."

"Okay," Miranda said. It seemed like a weird game, but Miranda knew she could be creative.

  


Peggy and Miranda went into the kitchen. Miranda pulled herself onto the counter so that she could be at eye-level with Peggy.

Peggy started the game by taking a spoon out of a kitchen drawer without using her thumbs.

Miranda succeeded in picking up the spoon and then balanced it on her nose.

Peggy balanced the spoon with a smile at Miranda. Peggy then poured a small glass of milk, took a drink, and blew a milk bubble.

Miranda managed the milk bubble, though hers was considerably messier than Peggy's. She wiped her mouth, giggling a little, and ran her finger around the rim of the glass, producing an eerie sound.

Peggy also made the tone, marveling at the quality of crystal the Fieglesteens used for drinking glasses. She emptied the glass, turned it upside down and balanced two interlocked forks over the base.

Miranda, with vast experience helping Jordan build things, easily balanced the forks. She then made a complicated hand shadow of an eagle, which would have cost Peggy the game had one of her girl scout friends not taught it to her one night at camp.

After duplicating the shadow, Peggy decided it was time to spring her trap. She turned the drinking glass right side up and squirted into it the mouthful of milk she had never swallowed.

Miranda's blue eyes widened in surprise. She pursed her lips and fixed Peggy with a steady glare. There was something in that expression that said: 'You outsmarted me. That's unusual. I don't like that a bit.' Peggy had a feeling that Miranda was trying to memorize every detail of her face. All Miranda said, however, was a mild, "You win."

Miranda went to bed without further protest. Mr. and Mrs. Fieglesteen were highly impressed with Peggy's results when they arrived home around midnight. Miranda was asleep and there was no obvious bodily or property damage from whatever Peggy had done to get her that way. They put her right at the top of their babysitter list.

Unfortunately, what could have been a wonderful and beneficial friendship for Miranda was not meant to be. Peggy's family had to move again before another babysitting opportunity presented itself, and with all the subsequent chaos in each of their lives, Miranda and Peggy wouldn't even recognize one another when they met again...at least not consciously.


End file.
